This is so true and best encapsulated in an HL Mencken quote I used in a previous life vis a vis climate change but it applies to so many other things. Remember Y2K for example.
Mencken’s observation still resonates today:
“…The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary”
READ ON —
“….Let’s hope the 20th anniversary of Bill Clinton’s apocalyptic address to the National Academy of Sciences does not slip by unnoticed. In nervous times such as these there is much to be learned from the spent anxieties of the past.
In July 1998 Clinton, then US president, warned that the world had just 535 days to deal with “one of the most complex management challenges in history”. Billions of computer chips could be infected by the Y2K bug. “This is not one of the summer movies where you can close your eyes during the scary parts,” Clinton lectured.
A month earlier The New York Times had warned: “A few scattered optimists still argue that the problem has been grossly exaggerated, but most experts insist that it is now too late to avoid serious disruptions.”
Not for the first time, scattered optimists found themselves on the right side of history as the year 2000 began without the digital conflagration we had been told to expect.
The eagerness to believe the worst that gave licence to the Y2K hype set the tone for this melancholic century. For much of the 20th century, Australians looked forward to the golden age, confident that scientific progress would overcome obstacles and that prosperity would continue to grow.
Today hardly a bulletin goes to air without news of a fresh catastrophe lurking just around the corner caused by mankind’s lust and stupidity.
As a result, children are graduating from Year 12 with a deeply pessimistic view about the future of the world, puzzled by the attitude of parents and grandparents who grew up in more confident times.
Kids in Victoria, for example, learn about the concept of economic scarcity before they get to high school. They are taught in Year 6 “that our needs and wants are unlimited but the resources available to satisfy these wants are limited”.
Year 9 students in South Australia consider “the nature of European occupation of Australia”, and in Year 10 are subjected to the educational equivalent of push-polling. They are asked to debate questions such as “Is Australia’s refugee policy fair?”, “Who owns the land?” and “Should Australia be so closely allied with the USA and Britain?”
These random examples from curriculum documents give a taste of the world view we are handing our children. We tell them that the conveniences we enjoy have come at a tremendous cost; history is simply one dark story after another.
Even the tale of Peter Rabbit becomes a tale of struggle, oppression and stolen land, in an otherwise charming children’s film showing at a cinema near you. Peter is no longer a gluttonous, thieving bunny but a cotton-tailed champion of animal rights, challenging the authority of Mr McGregor to fence off his land.
The evidence that modernity has made the world a better place is largely expunged from this dreary narrative, breeding ignorance about humankind’s achievements.
A British survey by Gapminder, for example, found that 88 per cent believed the proportion of the global population in extreme poverty was growing or static. It is an entirely false perception. The World Bank, no less, argues that the proportion of the global population in extreme poverty has fallen from 35 per cent in 1990 to 10 per cent today.
We can thank capitalism for that, incidentally, something else largely expunged from the miserablist textbooks.
The eagerness to believe the worst about almost everything contrasts sharply with the spirit of progress, the enlightened faith in the forward movement of science and technology that had increased the sum of prosperity and justice. That philosophy has become subsumed by the spiritless obsession with “sustainability”, a word that entered common use in the 1990s, reflecting a consuming fear that the world was running out of stuff.
Christopher Pearson, a former columnist for The Australian who died in 2013, noted the deep-seated pessimism in the rhetoric of global warming in 1997.
“Perhaps, having safely negotiated the millennium, which is a major cause of all this anxiety, we may collectively surrender to a bout of unqualified optimism,” he wrote. “I doubt it, because the appetite for catastrophe is now highly developed and mass media delight in pandering to it.”
Hardcore fatalists will protest that gloominess has been forced on them in a world where there is much to be gloomy about. Previous generations did not have to worry about record April temperatures, an obesity epidemic and provocative presidential tweets.
Our ancestors stand accused of closing their eyes to homophobia, child sexual abuse, Aboriginal under-representation, the gender pay gap and countless other social ills that cannot be laughed off. Humour is a weapon denied to today’s public figures, who are required to be serious about everything. They must apologise for every slight, whatever the intention.
Hence Olympic gold medallist Kerri Pottharst was obliged to grovel last week for labelling beach volleyballers “human lamingtons” during a Commonwealth Games broadcast. Many would consider it an apt description for sand stuck to a sweaty body, but the thought police deemed it to be demeaning towards the Caribbean athletes’ shape and colour.
Leaving aside the severity of today’s social challenges, if social challenges they are, pessimism with its tendency towards despondency is an unhelpful frame of mind in any circumstance.
In the middle of World War II, Robert Menzies broadcast to the nation on the importance of cheerfulness, calling it “a shining weapon in our national armoury”.
Humourlessness would be the downfall of the fanatics who had provoked the conflict. “To our eternal salvation, we shall always laugh at the wrong time — which will probably turn out to be the right time,” he said.
If the liberal philosophy Menzies re-energised struggles to gain traction today, it is because it is profoundly at odds with the alarmist zeitgeist. Menzies appealed to a population that believed Australia’s best days were ahead, that understood how individual ambition drives a nation forward and had the confidence to take risks in the expectation of reward. Only the scattered optimists would believe that today.
Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.
As a result, children are graduating from Year 12 with a deeply pessimistic view about the future of the world, puzzled by the attitude of parents and grandparents who grew up in more confident times.
Kids in Victoria, for example, learn about the concept of economic scarcity before they get to high school. They are taught in Year 6 “that our needs and wants are unlimited but the resources available to satisfy these wants are limited”.
Year 9 students in South Australia consider “the nature of European occupation of Australia”, and in Year 10 are subjected to the educational equivalent of push-polling. They are asked to debate questions such as “Is Australia’s refugee policy fair?”, “Who owns the land?” and “Should Australia be so closely allied with the USA and Britain?”
These random examples from curriculum documents give a taste of the world view we are handing our children. We tell them that the conveniences we enjoy have come at a tremendous cost; history is simply one dark story after another.
Even the tale of Peter Rabbit becomes a tale of struggle, oppression and stolen land, in an otherwise charming children’s film showing at a cinema near you. Peter is no longer a gluttonous, thieving bunny but a cotton-tailed champion of animal rights, challenging the authority of Mr McGregor to fence off his land.
The evidence that modernity has made the world a better place is largely expunged from this dreary narrative, breeding ignorance about humankind’s achievements.
A British survey by Gapminder, for example, found that 88 per cent believed the proportion of the global population in extreme poverty was growing or static. It is an entirely false perception. The World Bank, no less, argues that the proportion of the global population in extreme poverty has fallen from 35 per cent in 1990 to 10 per cent today.
We can thank capitalism for that, incidentally, something else largely expunged from the miserablist textbooks.
The eagerness to believe the worst about almost everything contrasts sharply with the spirit of progress, the enlightened faith in the forward movement of science and technology that had increased the sum of prosperity and justice. That philosophy has become subsumed by the spiritless obsession with “sustainability”, a word that entered common use in the 1990s, reflecting a consuming fear that the world was running out of stuff.
Christopher Pearson, a former columnist for The Australian who died in 2013, noted the deep-seated pessimism in the rhetoric of global warming in 1997.
“Perhaps, having safely negotiated the millennium, which is a major cause of all this anxiety, we may collectively surrender to a bout of unqualified optimism,” he wrote. “I doubt it, because the appetite for catastrophe is now highly developed and mass media delight in pandering to it.”
Hardcore fatalists will protest that gloominess has been forced on them in a world where there is much to be gloomy about. Previous generations did not have to worry about record April temperatures, an obesity epidemic and provocative presidential tweets.
Our ancestors stand accused of closing their eyes to homophobia, child sexual abuse, Aboriginal under-representation, the gender pay gap and countless other social ills that cannot be laughed off. Humour is a weapon denied to today’s public figures, who are required to be serious about everything. They must apologise for every slight, whatever the intention.
Hence Olympic gold medallist Kerri Pottharst was obliged to grovel last week for labelling beach volleyballers “human lamingtons” during a Commonwealth Games broadcast. Many would consider it an apt description for sand stuck to a sweaty body, but the thought police deemed it to be demeaning towards the Caribbean athletes’ shape and colour.
Leaving aside the severity of today’s social challenges, if social challenges they are, pessimism with its tendency towards despondency is an unhelpful frame of mind in any circumstance.
In the middle of World War II, Robert Menzies broadcast to the nation on the importance of cheerfulness, calling it “a shining weapon in our national armoury”.
Humourlessness would be the downfall of the fanatics who had provoked the conflict. “To our eternal salvation, we shall always laugh at the wrong time — which will probably turn out to be the right time,” he said.
If the liberal philosophy Menzies re-energised struggles to gain traction today, it is because it is profoundly at odds with the alarmist zeitgeist. Menzies appealed to a population that believed Australia’s best days were ahead, that understood how individual ambition drives a nation forward and had the confidence to take risks in the expectation of reward. Only the scattered optimists would believe that today. Glass has never been so half empty
Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.